


An Even Greater Sunrise

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: For A Sweet Dead Man, Gen, He Dies But It's Not A Big Deal, Keetz Theory, Long Kravitz Backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 17:50:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10859028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: Kravitz has a very boring life and then averyinteresting death. Afterwards, things get positively noteworthy.





	An Even Greater Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> The Raven Queen says, necromancy is whack, kids.

Alone in an apartment above a city full to bursting with necromantic magic, a young man is dying.

He seems to know this. Perhaps this is why he pushes himself out of the cocoon of covers built for him, stumbles from his sagging bed and makes his way over to the mostly empty shelves on the wall. He paws through the foodstuffs and thread bobbins piled neatly there, then shoves the entire shelf away. Behind it, there is a small alcove where the weak plaster has given way, revealing an space full of dust and spiders webs.

Hidden there are a few books, two dark robes, and an assortment of cheap spell components of the macabre inclination. Bones and blood in little vials, mouse skulls and tiny tins with neat labels and barely scraped off price stickers. His sister and brother haven’t been very good at hiding their activities. He’s dying, not blind.

The rest of the supplies are slightly suspect, but the books are perfect, old and leather bound and with a clinical edge to the pentagrams. Not an amateur's necronomicon, rather a scientist’s. For once, their good, learned upbringing is useful for something. They know how to find good books.

The young man drags the thickest of them out and feverishly leafs through it until, at the very back, he find what he wants. There are several warnings prefacing the ritual, however it is described and it turns out to be quite simple. Maybe the assumption is that anyone stupid enough to do it isn’t going to be able to handle long summonings. Stupid or fever addled or both, he definitely can’t. Besides, he isn’t sure how much more time he has.

He stumbles from the apartment, a tattered quilt still draped around his shoulders, and returns a few minutes later with a handful of black feathers and a helpful but hesitant neighbour chivvying him back to his room. Feathers, raven or otherwise, are not hard to find, these days. Everyone needs a little talisman in a time of dying, even if the goddess of the hour is by all accounts apathetic to their suffering. Some whisper she might be the cause of it. All this does is make the devotees clutch their amulets closer.

Shaking hands draw the an even shakier chalk circle and lay the components of the spell down. Still kneeling, not sure if he’s able to stand, he starts the summoning. Despite his glassy eyes, his enunciation is excellent.

Astonishingly, the Raven Queen answers. More astonishingly, Kravitz doesn’t die right away.

He has not had a very astonishing life so far. This is to be the first and last exceptional act of it.

His unlife, on the other hand, will be something _marvelous_.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The story starts, as all stories do, with a mother. It’s not that her name is not important, all names are important. It simply isn’t important in the context of her children. They call her Mama, and that only rarely.

She is, after all, a working lady. She wouldn’t call herself that out loud, but she is. The work is teaching, and the students are invariably rich. Governessing is slightly more respectable than some of the other work available- somewhere in between priestessing and adventuring- but it is work. The secret to it is to pretend it isn’t. The best sort of governess appears to be an eccentric aunt, fluttering from house to house, being paid under the table, and bringing class and a breadth of knowledge with her. Like a certain sort of eccentric “aunt”, she also sometimes sleeps with her employers.

Under those circumstances, the children were almost an inevitability.

The twins come first.

They are a liability and she knows it from the first moment they kick inside her. The world is a chaotic place, and the upper crust like their childrens’ teachers unburdened by such concerns. She is a very good governess. She has just gotten a measure of reputation. She takes measures to protect it.

The end plot involves a lot of very clever tailoring, lots of exceptional Illusion magic, and a three month break for her health that helpfully ends up coinciding with another necromantic cult in the capital. They’ve been popping up like boils lately. New advances in magic and some sort of celestial shakeup involving a new goddess means raising the dead is the new hot trend.

She leaves the children with two of her friends and goes back to work as soon as possible. No one suspects a thing. When Kravitz comes along five years later, she pulls of the feat again. A steady stream of money goes towards their upkeep, she visits them on weekends and when she’s outside the city, and the world spins on.

Lydia, Edward, and their little brother grow up in a string of respectable, middle class households. First there is the old priest of Istus and her wife, and then the lady who deals in magical books, and then the retired dame school teacher, and then the quiet tailor who owes their mother some unspoken debt. Their education is the only constant. The difference between someone with prospects and someone without is knowledge, she insists whenever she sees them. You can do anything if you know how, or at least know how to learn.

Kravitz takes to music. Lydia and Edward gobble up literature, and otherwise they ignore her. They pick up odds and ends from their guardians, from the cobbled streets, from each other. This is how to mend a dress, this is how to wash out a scrape, this is how to smile and charm and make do.

They take after their mother more than they realize.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


If there is one thing they always have, it’s each other. Kravitz is a difficult baby in the months after their mother leaves, and Lydia and Edward, five and newly upended and a little prone towards extreme reactions, guard him jealously.

Constant attention, baby names. His is hard for childish tongues to handle. Keetz is much easier. It sticks long past babyhood, half doting, half teasing.

They make a game out of it once he’s old enough to walk. Lydia insists loudly that they have no real parents, their mother is a ghost in the night and they have no idea who their fathers might be. Therefore the sensible solution is to be each other’s parents. It’s almost certainly an excuse to boss her brothers around as a self-declared mother-in-absentia, but they accept it graciously. They have easygoing personalities and she does not, and it all works out well. Really, people comment, they get along surprisingly well for siblings.

Gangs of children with half learned cantrips and wild eyes roam the streets of any big settlement. The trio steer clear of them. They’ve been raised to be well behaved, hard-working, and moderately suspicious. Large groups frighten them on instinct. After Lydia and Edward get in trouble over playing card games with school classmates, they avoid their peers for a while all together.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Kravitz is fifteen and the twins are twenty and unofficially apprenticed to the tailor looking after them, their mother shows up and dies. A half elf child, their younger sibling, dies with her. Hybrid deliveries can be so difficult without trained help.

They hold a surreptitious funeral, take stock of what money they have left, and for a while worry her employers will miss her. Somehow, her disappearance doesn’t even make it to the gossip mill. For all she tried to be exceptional, at the end of the day she was just the hired help.

  
  
  


  
Outside the sky is still light with the last wash of evening. Inside, the bubbly glass of the windows and the grime no one has bothered to wash up since Kravitz got too sick to clean keeps the room dim.

While they still had the last bits of their mother’s money, they’d rented two rooms above a haberdashery uptown. Slowly that had run out and they had not made enough even between the three of them to make it up.

They’d moved into a one bedroom, found two old bed frames and put a trundle bed under one of them- they switch around monthly just to be fair. Bookshelves, a camp stove, a basin in a corner and water fetched every morning from downstairs. Kravitz keeps it spotless. The narrow table in the corner is just wide enough to sew at on late nights. Third hand instruments are tucked under the larger, higher bed. Their mother’s old books are neatly stacked, dusted regularly, and rarely read. The penny dreadfuls in the corner get much more use.

It’s not a bad place, all things considered. Their neighbours are nice, the building is structurally sound even without the usual levitation spells to keep the roof from caving in. There are no mice. It is not in the exciting part of town, where sorcerers and warriors gallivant. There must be a place for people to work, and this is it.

Two alleys down, however, you can slip out into the shabbiest part of the theater district, where there are plays on every night and always bright lights and crowds and a bit of glamour.

Really, it suits them quite well.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They hold several jobs now, or they had before it all went wrong.

Kravitz taught music, played anything he could get his hands on. He wasn’t a virtuoso, had no specific skill, but he’d mastered more or less anything to the point that he could pick up foreign instruments and successfully guess his way into fair playing. It became helpful when someone suddenly needed a piccoloist on short notice. It also meant he could teach several instruments at once, a cost cutting mechanic many merchants with aspirations of nobility approved of. Everyone wanted a child who could play the harmonium or the flute, no one wanted to shell out for a professional when and amateaur could do almost as good of a job.

In the mornings, he gave lessons. The unfortunate children of social climbers, young wives and husbands trying to look well rounded, and a few aspiring bards who he was particularly fond of.

In the evening, he played accompaniment for the players troupes. A bit of light music really classed the whole thing up, as much as you could class up The Comedic Adventures Of Pan and His Lovers. He enjoyed the theatre, perhaps more than he should have. It was bad policy to get distracted by the show you were supposed to be scoring.

Nights, if he could get the job, there were one or two bars and gambling dens that appreciated a musician. Gambling was slippery, he knew from experience that he and his elder siblings had the potential for a bad habit there, but they all appreciated the art form.

(Preferring to be the players than the played, they restrained themselves to gambling for matchsticks by candlelight when they all had a free night.)

Lydia and Edward found a skill for sewing early and stuck with it. Officially they are still sticking with it, however they haven’t been going to work for weeks, for several reasons.

Once, they had woken up early, slipped down to the players houses and helped with costumes. They loved the glitz more than the mundane hemming jobs, preferred costumes to real clothes. Then, they would go to a seamstresses upstreet, stitch and smile and thoroughly impress. Twins got compliments, especially twins who knew how to use it, and they could mend by hand faster than magic.

If they could get out in time, they would go and watch the plays, wave to Kravitz and admire their handiwork. The lowest denominator of actors adored them. Elven tragedies, dwarf epics, human farces, halfling murder mysteries, if it had a budget under a hundred gold pieces, a few of them would end up going Lydia-and-Edward or their sweet baby brother. Trained for teaching or not, they had been made for show business.

  
  
  
  
  


Every once in a while, there is someone wonderful. The Goliath strongman with the vaudeville act down the street, who compliments his hair. The kind eyed widower down the street, whose daughter Kravitz is teaching how to play the elven mandolin very unconventionally. They smile, he blushes, his siblings tease him.

Usually nothing comes out of it. Kravitz wears his nicest clothes for a few weeks, does nothing else because he’s painfully shy, and life continues. Sometimes… sometimes it is a little nicer, but even that rarely lasts. He suspects his older brother and sister don’t help much. Traditionally “terrifying” still eludes them, but they can be difficult when they set their mind to it.

It’s different with Lydia and Edward’s occasional, hopeless suitors. They don’t mean anything by it, they’re just trying on roles, exploring their options.

The three of them are all beautiful, for humans. Just another thing they inherited from their mother. Sometimes he does wish she’d stuck around long enough to teach them how to use it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Kravitz remembers, like a dream, their rare and treasured visits to the opera. Money saved up over weeks for treasured tickets, dresses and suits laid out the night before for peer review. Their seats had always been terrible, and it hadn’t mattered. Every bit of it had been perfect, the shining costumes, the orchestra, the stories of adventurers and dungeons and gods. He’d wanted to be a conductor, to rule over all the multitudes of musicians. He’d wanted to tell a story with music, to control it with nothing but a flick of the wrist.

There is a universe, where nothing catastrophic happens in the here and now. He becomes an acclaimed conductor, Lydia and Edward costume the greatest of shows, they are successful and happy and die like normal, sensible humans.

This is not that universe.

  
  
  
  
  
  


It starts with a book, published using new magical copying techniques. Secrets of Necromancy for Beginners, more or less.

Other factors contribute, a rise in literacy, the march of magical progress, a goddess who is somehow new, The book is where it starts though.

What had been a trend before, now becomes a fad. Everyone wants to raise great grandma from the grave. Death is cruel, surely is can be thwarted. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes a horrible abomination tears up half a city street. For a while it’s a minor public crisis. Lydia, Edward, and Kravitz steer clear. There is no one they really want to resurrect.

A few of their acquaintances join cults, then a few of their friends. Actors tend to be easily influenced. The hardworking, sensible people around them like a shot at immortality. They have so little, it isn’t fair that early death takes children and partners away.

Through it all, there is a name. _Her_ name. _She_ has scourged the sorcerers in the school on the hill who tried to summon her, _she_ sent a knight to handle the zombies in the mountains. She will not approve of all this. For all that she supposedly doesn’t approve, she doesn’t seem to be doing much about it, Kravitz notes. Scourges and knights are all well and good, but gods are supposed to interfere more than that.

Apparently interfering isn’t her thing. He spent some time in a house of Istus as a child, he can respect that. Otherwise, the three of them steer clear of her misguided followers and desperate acolytes. They’ve never been much for religion.

Sticking together is the way through this, Lydia insists. Together they can survive anything.

Work peters off for a while, then picks back up. Terrible times are when people need music and beautiful things most of all.

Stories of the sickness start to circulate.

It starts in a town by the ocean, where they are trying to bring back the dead, because who isn’t these days? They ask some old god to help them, or so the rumour goes, and then the narrative gets murky. Mostly, it clears up by the time it gets to the brain melting necromantic virus they created out of sea sludge and a vengeful ghost.

Lydia giggles and says it makes a good story. Edward scoffs. Kravitz retunes the borrowed cello he’s using for the night and decides that it would be better if it was told in an accent.

When people start dying, then they take it seriously.

It spreads fast, in ways no one can quite track. (Later, they’ll decide it’s in the drinking water.) It is almost unnoticeable to anyone not looking for dark magic, at least until the fever starts.

All things considered, it’s a clean death. He sits with two of his students while they are dying and plays for them, trying to work magic into the notes. It doesn’t work. Later, Lydia scolds him for it, since they still don’t know how the sickness spreads, but he doesn’t regret it.

Slowly, the theaters and playhouses close up. The city goes into siege mode, trying to defend against itself. Death piles up in every doorway, on every street a casualty. The dying wander the streets, rambling and raving. They have a surprising amount of energy for invalids. With the early stages of the fever comes a fierce mania, people burning up from the inside out. Lydia locks them inside their room for a week, while fires rage on the outskirts of the city and the cries of the baby next door peter away.

What is very strange, to Kravitz, is that somehow this just makes more people turn to necromancy for solace. You can’t fight fire with fire, but somehow everyone thinks that you can solve a plague with some light death magic. It doesn’t make any sense.

Once the worst of it has died down, Edward carefully reopens the door, and they venture out for food. Kravitz buys bread while the twins disappear. He comes back to the apartment to find them already there, looking suspiciously innocent. Because he loves them, and knows they like their little games, he ignores it and tries to go back to normalcy.

The streets are a little emptier. The stage is a little quieter. His roster of students has shrunk dramatically. Still, they make do. Together, they can survive anything.

Edward and Lydia go somewhere every afternoon. It doesn’t take him long to realize that they’ve set up an unofficial trade in black cloaks and distinguished cult-ish robes. Edward keeps complaining about how boring it is. Which is… weird but it keeps them with food in their bellies so Kravitz isn’t going to complain. Music doesn’t pay very well in the aftermath of a public health crisis, when people are still dropping dead periodically and a cure is still nowhere in sight. The most wizards can say is that it’s probably working it’s way through the populace.

The twins new clientele means when Kravitz gets sick, they know immediately.  
  
He, on the other hand doesn’t. It takes him a few days odd manic episodes and a sudden energy in his movements, of dizzy spells and strange headaches, to realize what’s happening. Edward has always accused him of being a little slow on the uptake.

The herbs they slip in his soup finally tips him off. There’s a very short argument that turns into Lydia calling him Keetz and promising to help him, with a gleam in her eyes that is concerning.

Kravitz trusts her, of course, she’s his big sister. Three days into bed rest, he remembers that sometimes big sisters can do very stupid things. Then he gets worried, but by that point there’s not much he can do about it.

How much can a dying man do, after all?

With this bright illness in his bones, he can do a surprising amount.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s common knowledge that while magical skill might be inherited, magical inclinations are not. You can train a child towards evocation, but if alchemy is their calling it will come through. It is as random as a roll of the dice, as insistent as the flow of water, and difficult to divert. Studies have been done on the subject, more and more as time has gone on.

Kravitz and his older siblings suggest the exact opposite. Looking at them you could easily assume that not only is necromancy incredibly inheritable, but that it skips a generation.

Their mother was a multitalented magician, in the quiet, sensible way of scholars. A teaching wizard, one who studied just enough to instruct others. Her range had been broad, and her skills extensive given her lack of formal magical education beyond what was traditionally given to a well raised young woman of mystical inclinations.

As time had gone on, she’d developed a formidable knack for illusions, out of necessity as much as anything.

Lydia and Edward had never shared her skill. They’d learned cantrips, then fizzled out. Make Light and Mage Hand was about where their abilities stopped. With Kravitz there wasn’t as much of an effort. He learned what the twins did, because they taught him.

As he grew and his skill for music began to shine, there had been some cursory attempts at getting him to a proper bardic mentor, but he’d never showed much skill at that either. He enjoyed the music for what it was, without grasping the potential for power underneath.

In necromancy however, they _excel_ , at least for the limited time alive that they get to practice it.

(In death they do even better. Some skills you don’t know you have until you need them. Some farmers go all their life unaware of what good sea legs they have. It is, from a certain point of view, a stroke of luck that they discover their talents before they go to waste. Of course, many, many people would argue otherwise.)

To Kravitz’s surprise, the words roll of his tongue with ease. All that time around actors means he knows how to read a script. Hours spent watching men and women gambling their lives away has given him an excellent sense of when to take the big risk.

He knows the twins have been frequenting cults as of late, trying to help him, trying to protect him, he knows this is stupid. He’s a dead man walking. All he can do now is save them.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The Raven Queen appears not as a woman but as the absence of a woman. There is a hole in space, with feathers floating all around, and a shadow stretching out on the floor to touch Kravitz’s fingertips, despite all the laws of ambient lighting. The divine presence just about floors him. This is less impressive of a feat with a man so fever ridden he’s seeing double.

She does not speak, just waits.

His lips are dry and cracked, and his voice suddenly feels uncertain. What is it warlocks said at bars? The summoning was the easy part.

“So,” he says in a voice that cracks like he’s a teenager again, “You don’t like necromancy, right?” Then recognizing that this is a goddess, he tacks on a, “My lady of…featheriness,”

“ _Who are you?_ ” she asks, sounding more confused than anything. Her voice resounds inside his skull and vibrates in his shinbones. It is a lucky thing their neighbours are dead, this late at night he doesn’t want to be keeping anyone up with divine wrath.

“Kravitz, I- I-”

She interrupts him. “ _You’re dying_.”

Sweat trickles down his temple. “Yes.”

“ _I'_ _m not going to do anything about that_ ,” the Raven Queen warns him, almost kindly. Her voice has moved down from a tomb like echo to a pleasant reverb.

“Don’t worry, I don’t- I mean, I’m fine with this. Not thrilled, I mean who is, but I think I’m okay with it.” Somewhere in between the panic building in his chest and the swimming heat filling his head and drowning out coherent thought, he really is. Priests make promises about the afterlife, but he’s lived through the Golden Age of Necromancy. He has picked up, in bits and pieces, that what comes after isn’t that bad. The Astral Plane, scholars call it. It sounds pleasant enough.

Something imperceptible changes in her demeanor, a softening to the not-face, a slowing of the whirl of feathers. “ _Then why summon me?_ ”

Kravitz swallows, tries to collect his thoughts, tries to be smart and respectful and above all charming. “My older brother and sister are being very, very irresponsible. I’m worried if I die they’ll do something dangerous. I don’t want them to get in trouble. Dying is one thing… but I’ve seen the sort of chaos you can wreck playing with the rules of life and death. I thought you could talk to them, make sure they don’t act rashly once I’m gone. Your highness.” Every word is a struggle of cognition. It pays off.

“You are eloquent, for a dying man,” she observes in a voice that is almost human, “I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m afraid I can’t interfere like that. If your summoning had not been quite so impressive, I wouldn’t even be here.”

He can feel his strength slipping away, “You have to do something!”

“I have to do _nothing_.” she says harshly, “I can do nothing. There are rules. I must act through a proxy, and I have few of those at hand.”

She is looking at him, and he knows he looks like a mess. He will not apologize for it. He’s dying. A sweat soaked dress shirt and a hastily pulled on coat is more than can be expected, under the circumstances.

“You should do something,” he argues weakly, “People are acting incredibly stupid and no one is telling them not to… ma’am.”

“You would think dark magics serve as an automatic warning, wouldn’t you?” she points out dryly. “I’m working on getting the current issues under control. I’m sorry you are going to die before I can fix it.”

Now that they are in the realm of apologies, pent up guilt washes over him. This is a goddess he has called to his home, bothered with his inconvenient last . “Sorry for summoning you, your majesty. You’re probably very busy.”

The Raven Queen laughs. “I can be everywhere and nowhere. Call it a perk of the position. You are much preferable to the usual callers, young man.”

“Oh. Good.” The worn floorboards were growing concerningly blurry in front of him. If he hadn’t already been kneeling, he would have fallen forward. Some mumble of confusion slips through his lips.

“The fever,” the Raven Queen confirms. “It was meant to help bring the dying back to life, so it is an interesting death. I’m afraid this is your last second wind though. After this it will be easier.”

“Well that’s a consolation, my lady,” he says sarcastically, lifting his head to look at the vaguely human shaped void that she is. It seems bigger now, as if it encompasses the whole room. “Did you get all those feathers from people who summoned you?”

“What? No, they’re mine. They’re me. You’re babbling. Is there anyone here to look after you?”

He shakes his head weakly, “Lydia and Edward went out to get food, but no food takes this long. They’ve definitely joined a cult, they just don’t want to tell me. I don’t know why they think they can keep it a secret, we share a _room_.”

“I can see that,” the goddess agrees, “Lydia and Edward are the brother and sister who don’t make good choices?”

Kravitz feels as though he has to defend them, in more ways than one. They are almost certainly engaging in necromancy and this is a decidedly anti-necromancy deity. “Yes, your majesty. They’re very smart, but sometimes they can be a bit… extreme in their reactions to things.”

“That does sound like an issue. I’ll see what I can do about it. What are they, sorcerers?” There is a pause as she looks around the spartan room. “Bards?”

“No, the music is mine. They sew things? Sew things and talk to people, mostly. They’ve very good at talking to people.”

“I see.” He can hear the smothered giggles in her serene, godly intonation. He tries not to be too offended.

“Talking can be dangerous. It’s amazing what you can get people to do just by talking to them, especially if you can do imitations. One time old Rollo, the playwright, got out of his rent by impersonating his landlord to her husband. You can clear even a bar by shouting a spell loudly enough in a posh accent.”

“Yes, I can see why that might be the case, for you if not for me,” she agrees amiably. If he doesn’t look directly at her, he can almost forget he’s talking to a goddess. She sounds kind, not in the soft patronizing manner of nursery teachers, but an entirely more stern, real way.

“That was before necromancy got popular, of course,” he adds, “Now you’d just have a bunch of idiots in very badly tailored robes trying to throw skulls at you. They ruin _everything_.” He can feel consciousness slipping away from him, the floor growing closer every second.

As he falls, the Raven Queen says, “That they do. Sorry again, about your death.”

“Not your fault,” he mumbles, and then he sleeps.

That is just about it for the life of Kravitz.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


After a few minutes pass and it becomes apparent no one is coming home soon, the Raven Queen steps out of the uneven chalk circle on the floor and wills herself into substantiality. The boy is half-dead, this is practically her domain. At the very least, it’s a grey area. Isn’t she allowed to do favours for worshippers and… supplicants? Surely, he counts as one of the two.

She picks his limp form up and drags it over to the bed, tries to make him comfortable as best she remembers how. There are blankets piled up there and she layers them on top of him. Best not to prolong the inevitable. It will still be weeks of suffering, but she can make this as easy as possible.

With one, barely there hand, she touches his fevered brow, unsure of what she is looking for. She can feel the death fighting up from inside of him, she doesn’t need such niceties.

It’s been a long time since she’s watched someone die of mostly natural causes. Usually she gets the other side of the equation.

He seems a sweet young man, and she does like being summoned for something new for once, so she sits by his bed until his brother and sister come home.

They are human, probably quite lovely, and looking very much like each other and not much like him. Necrotic energy clings to them like a bad smell. They freeze in the doorway, staring at her in horror, bundles of food and folded robes falling from their hands.

What had Kravitz said? It was amazing what you could do by talking.

She puts on her very best goddess-ing voice.

“ **_Say NO to Necromancy,_ ** ” she advises before she takes her leave and hopes they’ll take the message to heart. It’s the most and least she can do.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Kravitz dies. He find this improves his clarity of mind dramatically.

The Raven Queen is waiting for him, a situation that elicits automatic panic.

“I am terrible sorry about the whole summoning thing, I hope I didn’t inconvenience you-”

She waves his apologies away, briskly. She looks different now, more concrete and yet more alien. “It was no problem. I actually found it quite entertaining, no offense.”

“None taken,” he says weakly.  
  
“It’s always nice to find humans who have sensible viewpoints. Humans or anyone, really. Certainly many people aren’t ragingly in favour of raising the dead, however it doesn’t tend to inspire the same enthusiasm as the alternative does. It’s hard to find proponents of common sense.”

That does check with what he knows about people. The Raven Queen gestures for him, or the him that exists in this formless space, to move closer to her and he does, hesitantly.

“Now, I usually try to let the dead stay dead, but as you pointed out when we last spoke I do have something of a problem on my hands. People can be so insensible,” she pauses, then adds kindly, “Your own family included. I’ve been watching these past few weeks. Now, what did you say you did?”

“I am, I mean- I was a musician.” Kravitz tells her. It’s strange to speak of yourself in the past tense. He’s worried about Lydia and Edward now, terrified for them, but that fear is distant. Death adds a certain calmness to all worldly matters.

“A bard?”

“No, I taught music, played at theaters, sometimes the local night scene.”

The Raven Queen considers this. “Hmm. We could work on that, if we needed to. Kravitz, do you trust me?”

It’s a strange thing to ask of someone you’ve only met twice, even if those two times were both incredibly stressful circumstances. It’s an even odder thing for a god to ask. They’re supposed to want faith, not trust. Despite that, he discovers he does. She seems like a steady, stalwart individual… of the godly persuasion.

“Yes, ma’am.” he answers politely.

“In that case, I have an offer for you. It is not exactly standard procedure, but you seem to be an exceptional man,” she smiles, “I think you could do well with it."  
  
  
  



End file.
